January 19th, 2010
Cross-platform interface design for RIAs
I’ve already professed my love of breaking out of the browser a few months back. They’re awesome, and fun, and not terribly hard or expensive to build- but they do present an interesting opportunity/problem. What should a good “internet app” look like?
One approach is to just go nuts and make it looks however we like- that’s what we did first time out of the gate, with rssTunes. I’m pretty happy with it, it’s cute and integrates nicely with the website and hopefully it brings a little bit of joy to our users whenever they fire it up to rock out to music curated by their favorite curators (/plug). But it might be a bit much for a “real” app you’re supposed to interact with in a cubical for 8 hours a day. Or maybe you’re tinkering on the ultimate time wasting socially enabled applet ever, and you’d like it to be somewhat discreet among your Outlook and Spreadsheets and TPS Reports instead of screaming “HEY LOOK AT ME DOING ALL THIS WACKY STUFF ON THE TUBES”.
So the dilemma- making your app look natural inside a modern desktop OS, which for the sake of discussion we’ll limit to Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. While they each have their own unique user experience (and quirks), at this stage in the game, they both present a similar level of polish and graphical snazziness. And we’ve also seen cases on both platforms where indie developers have moved away from system generated resources without going completely off the reservation and making an app/experience that just feels “right” on it’s respective platform. Our goal in our next RIA? To craft one core look that is modern, clean, and most importantly- easily able to fit in like a first class native app on either platform.
Without giving away too much, our initial pass illustrates it might be possible. The core artwork is just about the same in each implementation, with the coloring/tinting handled programatically. Here, take a peek:
Our mystery app, which apparently does little more than showcase tweets of advertising luminaries at this point, appears to be comfortable swinging both ways. I will let Jack tackle the black magic of platform detection, but- assuming he gets it working- the user will be oblivious to this nifty bit of UI ambidexterity and the app will just show up looking “right”. Cool.